Anthony Bozza - Slash - The Autobiography

Usually we had weed, which was always a crowd pleaser

ALL OF THOSE PERMUTATIONS WERE going to work themselves out over the next eight years of my life, but only once I’d found a stable family of my own design.

In the vacuum that my family’s dissolution left in its wake, I made my own world. I’m lucky enough that, despite my age, during a period of testing my boundaries, I made one friend who has never been far from me, even when we’ve been worlds apart. He is still one of my closest confidants, which, after thirty years, says a fuck of a lot.

His name is Marc Canter; his family owns the famous L.A. institution Canter’s Deli on North Fairfax. The Canter family moved from New Jersey and opened the restaurant in the 1940s and it’s been a hub for show-business types ever since, because of the food and the fact that it’s open twenty-four hours. It’s only a half mile from the Sunset Strip, and in the sixties it became a haven for musicians and has remained so ever since. In the eighties, bands like Guns had many a late-night meal there. The Kibbitz Room, which is their bar and live music venue next door has hosted too many great nights of music to name. The Canters have been wonderful to me; they’ve employed me, they’ve sheltered me, and I can’t thank them enough.

I met Marc at Third Street Elementary School, but we didn’t really become friends until I almost stole his mini bike in fifth grade.

Our friendship was solidified from the start. He and I hung out in Hancock Park, which was next to the affluent neighborhood where he lived. We used to go down to the ruins of the Pan Pacific Theater, which is where the Grove shopping center is today. The Pan Pacific was an amazing relic; it had been a glamorous 1940s movie palace, with an arched ceiling and huge screen that showed news reels and defined a generation’s worth of cinematic culture. In my day, it was still beautiful: the green Art Deco arches were still intact, though the rest was reduced to rubble. Next to the lot was a public library and a park with a basketball court and a pool. Like Laurel Elementary, it was a meeting point for kids aged twelve to eighteen, who, for one reason or another, found their way out at night.

My friends and I were the young ones on the scene; there were chicks so far out of our league that we couldn’t even count the ways—though we did anyway. There were flunkies and dropouts, many of whom lived in the ruins of the theater and subsisted on the food they stole from the farmers’ market that took place next door twice a week. Marc and I were fascinated; we gained acceptance among them because usually we had weed, which was always a crowd pleaser. Meeting Marc triggered a change in me; he was my first best friend—he was someone who understood me when I felt no one else did. Neither of us have had lives that one might call normal, but I’m proud to say that we’re just as close as we were then. That is my definition of family. A friend still knows you as well as they used to even if you haven’t seen them in years. A true friend is there when you need him; they’re not around just on holidays and weekends.

I found that out firsthand a few years later. When I barely had money to eat, I didn’t care, so long as I had money to promote Guns N’ Roses. And when I didn’t have money to print flyers or even buy myself guitar strings, Marc Canter was there for me. He’d front me the cash to take care of whatever needed to be done. I paid him back once I was able, once Guns got signed, but I never forgot that Canter was there for me when I was down and out.

Experiencing yourself out of context, divorced from your usual point of view, skews your perspective—it’s like hearing your voice on an answering machine. It’s almost like meeting a stranger; or discovering a talent you never knew you had. The first time I plucked a melody out on a guitar well enough that it sounded like the original was a bit like that. The more I learned to play guitar, the more I felt like a ventriloquist: I recognized my own creative voice filtered through those six strings, but it was also something else entirely. Notes and chords have become my second language and, more often than not, that vocabulary expresses what I feel when language fails me. The guitar is my conscience, too—whenever I’ve lost my way, it’s brought me back to center; whenever I forget, it reminds me why I’m here.

I owe it all to Steven Adler—he did it. He is the reason that I play guitar. We met one night at the Laurel Elementary playground when we were thirteen. As I remember it, he was skateboarding miserably. After a particularly hard fall, I rode over on my bike and helped him up and we were instantly inseparable.

Steven had grown up in the Valley with his mom, his stepdad, and his two brothers until his mom couldn’t take his bad behavior anymore and shipped him off to live with his grandparents in Hollywood. He lasted there for the remainder of junior high, summers included, before he was bused back to his mom to attend high school. Steven is special; he’s the kind of misfit that only a grandmother can love, but can’t live with.

Steven and I met the summer before eighth grade and hung out until high school, since I had just moved into my grandmother’s new condo in Hollywood, from my mom’s apartment in Hancock Park. Both of us were new to our school, Bancroft Junior High, as well as to the neighborhood. As long as I knew him, Steven never spent a full week’s worth of time in school out of any given month. I got by because I did well enough in my art, music, and English classes that my grade-point average was high enough to pass. I got As in art, English, and music because those were the only subjects that interested me. Apart from those I didn’t care for much else, and I cut class all the time. Since I had stolen a pad of absentee notices from the administration offices and forged my mom’s signature when I needed to, in the eyes of the administration, I was there much more often than I ever was. But the only reason I actually graduated junior high at all was due to a teachers’ strike during my final year. Our regular teachers were replaced by substitutes who were too easy for me to bullshit and charm. I don’t want to get into it, but on more than one occasion I recall playing my teacher’s favorite song on guitar for the entire class. Enough said.

To be honest, school wasn’t too bad: I had a whole circle of friends, including a girlfriend (who we’ll get to in just a little bit) and I partook liberally in every exercise that makes school enjoyable to stoners. Our crew met in the early morning before homeroom to snort locker room—a head-shop brand of amyl nitrite, a chemical whose fumes expand your blood vessels and lower your blood pressure and in the process give you a brief euphoric rush. After a few hits of locker room, we’d smoke a few cigarettes and at lunchtime reconvene in the courtyard to smoke a joint…. We did what we could to make the school day pleasant.

When I didn’t go to school, Steven and I spent the day wandering the greater Hollywood area with our heads in the clouds talking about music and hustling money. We did some offhand panhandling and odd jobs, like moving furniture for some of the random characters we’d meet. Hollywood has always been a weird place that attracts odd folks, but in the late seventies, with the strange turns culture had taken, from the letdown of the sixties revolution to the widespread use of drugs and loosened sexual mores, there were some really strange ones hanging around.